Contemporary political discourse is shrill. Hell, that might be it’s most characteristic feature. Shrill and nigh omnipresent. My wife complains fairly regularly that her facebook wall has devolved into links to snarky “thinkpieces” and running comment wars about them. Frequently between people who have known each other for years to boot. Fathers divided against sons and daughters against mothers, that sort of thing. Twitter’s much the same, far as I can tell. Superheated rhetoric, mutual incomprehension, acrimony. These two platforms are social media, of course, which tends to exaggerate all those phenomena. But I think it’s fair to say that even […]

Feminists and people of color believe white men are gods. Divine is what divine does. Divinity is the omnipresence of racism. White men have such a difficult time containing their power-levels that they exude evil unintentionally, like a superhero unable to pull off Clark Kent for but a minute before busting out in uniform. What’s a god? Gods are portrayed in myths as heroes which define societal standards of power, prestige, status, fulfillment, rightness, right action, right being. Society thinks white males are Nietzschean übermenschen. Put down Anton LaVey, White Man. You’ve already made it. What’s good, what’s decent, what […]

The phenomenon of #BlackBrunch, in which black activists pile into fashionable restaurants to ruin the dining experience for the people who live there, is wonderful for a whole number of reasons. At least, if you don’t live in cities like San Francisco, New York, and Oakland. It’s an in-your-face, modern version of blockbusting, a technique used by real estate developers during the early days of Civil Rights to ethnically cleanse white people from American cities while earning big commissions for doing it. Whereas in the 1960s, real estate agents had to hire black people at day rates to wander around neighborhoods […]